Tuesday, 28 April 2009

This is the second part of the BRII poster presented at the Lifelong Learning and Workforce Engagement Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Event on Friday 25th of April in Manchester. This bit was designed by Anne Bowtell MedSci Project Manager and Web Manager. It explains the technical aspects of the project: the Research Information Infrastructure and the harvesting of information by using semantic web ontologies and RDF technologies.

The event was interesting and very interactive. We met people from other projects within the Institutional Innovational programme. Good place for networking. Click here to see a slideshow with all the posters that participated. It will give you a good idea of the projects that attended. The posters were uploaded by the event organisers JISC in their event website. Unfortunately some of the posters are not legible as the slideshow does not allow zooming in. I also found that they are organised randomly! The two parts of the BRII poster are separate. :-0

Next thing in our agenda will be an Assembly that we are organising for the 9th of June. The topic of the agenda will be Stakeholder Buy-in. We have a guest speaker and we will ask other projects to present their views. Will post about this later in May.

Monday, 20 April 2009

This is the poster I designed for the upcoming JISC event. Click on the figure to see a larger version.

Here I try to show the two aspects of the BRII stakeholder analysis I am finding while doing it. Everytime I do some research on a department, an academic or an administrative officer, or everytime I setup an appointment I find new, different things. Every area within the University has their own way of doing things, some are more open than others, some are quicker than others at replying, some are more receptive and some are more skeptic.

The overall context of BRII is Research Management data but we are focusing only on Research Activity data. Research Activity data is the subset of management research data which is already or potentially publicly available. In other words Research Activity data is the public side of research management data. (I wrote about Research Management data here.) Due to the short life of the project we are focusing on building a pilot with publicly available data.

The line between public and confidential is not that clear though. On a first thought it would seem that identifying this subset would be simple. However, during this analysis I am finding different views in this respect. Some areas of the university which are probably more open would have more information as public, whereas other areas would keep most information as confidential. The poster shows some kinds of data which are often considered as public, e.g., researchers' profiles and publications.

Friday, 3 April 2009

Soon I will be attending the Lifelong Learning and Workforce Engagement Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Event Organised by JISC Institutional Innovation programme. (Yep, that is a long name.) The event will take place on the 23rd and 24th of April at the Macdonald hotel in Manchester. You can find the programme here.

The BRII project belongs to the Institutional Innovation Round 2. It is required that all projects belonging to that group design and display a poster. I will post a draft here as soon as i come up with something.

About this Blog

Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin

I am the BRII Project Analyst and responsible for this blog. I work at the Systems and e-Research Service at the Bodleian Libraries - Oxford University. E Cecilia.Loureiro-Koechlin@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, T +44 (0) 1865 280028, Contact address: Osney One, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0EW

Project Website

Our Goal

Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) aims to support the efficient sharing of Research Activity Data (RAD) captured from a wide range of sources. BRII develops an infrastructure that harvests and archives RAD, and Web services which disseminate and reuse this kind of data by using a lightweight solution based on semantic web technologies. Phases of the project include: a stakeholder analysis to collect views from interested parties (e.g., academics and administrators); an iterative development process which uses information collected in the analysis phase; and an embedding and sustainability phase where user acceptance is assessed and strategies to support the expansion of the information research infrastructure are designed. Additional outputs of the BRII include: an application programming interface (API) for harvesting and querying data; a collection of ontologies and taxonomies used to organise and classify data; a themed Web site; and the Oxford Blue Pages displaying RAD in creative ways. By facilitating access to RAD, BRII expects to improve the research visibility of the institution and its research impact, as well as boost collaboration.

Rumsey, S. (2010) BRII registry & other outputs A description of the pilot Research Activity Data Registry functionality, services and other outputs that will be developed by the project end (March 2010) and suggestions for further work.

Adding a researcher profile. Video clip demonstrating how to search for a researcher profile in the ORA registry and then embed this in a content managed website.

Loureiro-Koechlin C. (2009) Selling an abstract concept to a practical audience (presented at the Modular e-Administration of Teaching (MEAoT) Assembly, Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET), University of Cambridge, 10 December 2009.)